On July 30, 2008, I published an article in this blog called Branded and Rented Lives speculating about P2P file sharing of movie and music files being a behavior that, far from costing lost profits to the movie and music industries profits, is actually part of a profitable marketing strategy.
Today Wired Magazine published an article about the MPAA’s hyper-inflated estimates of the “worth” of their “losses” due to file sharing and piracy. The grossly distorted figures are used to lobby legislators for the type of legal oppression that provides a continuous supply of free advertising for MPAA and RIAA products, and ruins the lives of people who genuinely believe that every single CD in the world can’t justify a $13.74 price tag, and no DVD is worth $3225.80.
Here’s a quote from that article:
And if you think those numbers are high, consider last year when the MPAA said 200,000 illicit DVDs seized in Australia were worth $83 per movie disc. Some 6,200 pirated discs were also found in Hong Kong that year, and the MPAA affixed value at $20 million, meaning each disc was worth $3,225.80. We’re not kidding.
With such obviously bogus estimates of the losses in revenue, jobs and wages, it might be time for all of us to consider the real meaning of intellectual property theft.
If you steal what I write and publish it under your name, you have committed theft and can be prosecuted. Why? Is it because I’m losing money? No, because I don’t make any money from what I publish on the internet. So loss of revenue to the artist isn’t what copyright lawsuits are based on.
Copyright law is based on the concept of me being the sole owner of what I produce, and your theft of what I produce being wrong. Financial remuneration for my work isn’t, never has been, and hopefully never will be, the legal foundation of *anybody’s* copyright lawsuit.
When we buy into the outright lies told by large greedy organizations, like the MPAA and RIAA, we’re paving the road to laws which will say that OUR work can be stolen freely…if we don’t make money from it, or if we simply make less money from a work than a large corporation could. In other words, only large corporations would have the legal right to “own” intellectual property. Now that’s a slippery slope for all of us.
If you think I’m exaggerating when I say that large greedy corporations will someday have the legal right to steal from you because they have the ability to make big money off your work, and you have no rights over your ideas, talent, skills, and work because you can’t make as much money from them as a large corporation…think again.
This line of reasoning, that the ability to profit from the property of someone not using that property for financial gain, or for little financial gain, is the proper foundation of proof of ownership, is already being argued and rewarded in our courts. It’s the same argument used by greedy corporations to steal property from property owners so the corporation can turn grandpa’s farm into a strip mall, housing subdivision or vacation resort. And the argument is winning cases all across America!
It used to be that laws of eminent domain were used only to take your house or land from you when it was necessary to do so for a non-profit organization, like your city council, to use your property to provide for “the public good”. The reasoning was that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. If grandpa’s farm sat in the middle of a dam project that would prevent the little towns downstream from suffering the losses and damage of flooding, then grandpa lost his farm.
Today, in the 21st century, nobody is even pretending that “the public good” outweighs corporate profit. People are losing their homes, not from foreclosure, but from governing bodies saying: “Yeah, we can increase tax revenues, and make a nice profit, by taking property from our constituents and selling it to a corporation. Let’s do it!”
The people who pass our laws, the people who take oaths to serve “the public good,” are going along with corporations’ greed for ever greater profits. And who benefits? Do we, the people who paid 2-10-20-30-40-50 years for our home so we could have a secure future, profit from having our property seized and turned into a money making machine? Obviously we do not.
So if you’re sitting there thinking, “I don’t illegally download anything, I’m perfectly safe,” you need to do your own research and find out what copyright and eminent domain really are, how they’re being used today by corporations, and how they’re connected.
Just think how it would make you feel to have your house taken so a corporation could make money off of it. Think how it would make you feel to have your photo, video, blog post, website, etc. stolen by a big greedy corporation. You’d be sorely irritated. And, if your work was stolen and turned into something that made millions of dollars, how would you feel if you tried to sue to get your fair share of those millions and lost?
How would you feel if your work wasn’t legally considered your own unless you were making big bucks off of it? What kind of world would it be if any good idea you ever had could, by law, be considered not legally owned by you?
If you think , “It can’t happen here, this is America, we have rights,” you’re very wrong, because it’s already happening here. It’s up to you to find out what the MPAA and RIAA are doing, and why they’re doing it,…and stop the legal stamp of approval being placed on the greed of large corporations. Do it before you lose more than you’ve already lost.
The MPAA and RIAA tell you to stop being apathetic about “illegal downloading” because it’s cutting into their profits. I’m telling you to stop being apathetic about the MPAA and RIAA because they’re lying to you and your legislators.
All I can do is draw you a roadmap. It’s up to you to connect the dots. It’s up to all of us, working together, to see to it that our children aren’t forced by our apathy to live Branded and Rented Lives.
